Double the wine, double the fun?

Alright, that’s overstating it.

Pears are clearly in season right now, and the incredibly low prices reflect this. Being a seasonal sort of shopper, I can’t resist picking up a kilo or so, but this then leaves me wondering what to do.

Having bought some beurre boscs, I had to think about how I would cook them. I thought about a tart, but the previous week I had made apple and pear almondy tarts, and I thought it would be overkill to have pastry two weeks running. So I settled on a cake – but a prettier one than I would usually manage.

Inspired by this recipe, I decided to poach the pears in wine: half in red, and half in white. I then made an almondy cake batter, poured it into a tin and arranged the alternating pear slices on top. For once I managed to make something that actually looked good!

Recipe: Two-Wine Pear Almond Cake



3 beurre bosc pears
100g sugar
3 cardamom pods
½ cup each of white and red wine

80g soft butter
50g sugar
3 eggs
150g plain flour
50g almond meal
20g chestnut flour
Vanilla essence

Peel the pears, slice in half and core. Put the wine in two separate saucepans with 50g sugar and about half of the bashed cardamom in each. Medium heat until the sugar dissolves. Add three pear halves to each pan. Cook until the pears are softened (this took about 45 minutes). Remove pears, turn up the heat and reduce the poaching liquid until thick and syrupy.

Slice the pears thinly.

Pre-heat the oven to 170 degrees.

Put the softened butter into the bowl of a mixer along with the sugar and beat until pale and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well. Add the vanilla – as much as you like. I like a lot. Sift the flour into the mixer, along with the almond meal, and mix to combine. Add the white wine poaching liquor.

Pour into a greased and floured 9” springform tin. Arrange the pear slices, alternating red with white. Pour over the red wine poaching syrup.

Bake for 30-40 minutes, or until a skewer comes out clean. Allow to cool in the tin, then remove. Serve with icing sugar and sour cream.

Putting the "oooh" into frugal

Yet another article on food waste and how to avoid or take advantage of leftovers – I would like to think that the growing plethora of such articles indicates that people are more conscious that what they are currently doing is completely unsustainable.

For example, whilst Kylie Kwong rather irritates me on TV, she makes a very powerful point when she says, "if I throw out a kilo of white rice, I'm also wasting the 2385 litres of water that it took to grow that rice".

I have particular sympathy for the ethos espoused by Detmar Haupt, who attributes his minimised waste to control freaky precision. Since I took over as the Knight of the Kitchen Realm a couple of years ago, kitchen waste has been eliminated.

Firstly, we buy very little that comes in a packet. The only packety food we typically buy consists of milk, cheese, tinned tomatoes, tinned sardines, pasta, rice and lentils. Most of this is recyclable. As for kitchen waste, there's very little of that. Offcuts are either eaten by me, or the guinea pig (with the exception of large amounts of melon rind, or potato peelings, the latter being toxic). Consequently, the kitchen bin (25L) is emptied once a week and is often only half-full. It's a small thing, but I have also discovered that one does not die if one eats an apple in its entirety. Contrary to what my stepmother says, if you eat the seeds, a plant won't grow in your intestines…

I've also learnt that unless there's a really enormous amount of mould (and a little bit of forward planning – i.e., if you know something is perishable, use it FIRST), most leftover stuff is probably okay to eat. Obviously not if it's raw chicken/pork/seafood, but judicious refrigeration and reheating can easily keep food for a few days after its initial cook.

Whilst we buy an enormous amount of fresh food, which doesn’t come in lots of packaging – and I am increasingly avoiding plastic bags when buying loose fruit and vegetables – we never buy more than we intend to eat. Come Saturday morning, the crisper is inevitably empty. This also makes regular fridge cleans an easy task.

It's probably just as well we don't try to compost, because I doubt there'd be enough to feed a heap.

The additional benefit to all of this is that we spend far less at the supermarket in dollar terms (this is amplified when you take into account inflation) than we did ten years ago, and we eat far better too.

It is also worthwhile accurately portioning out food before it is cooked. I have got used to using measuring cups and my electronic scales so that I know how much pasta/rice/quinoa/lentils is right for one or two portions. It's not hard. By all means cook an excessive amount, but have a plan for how that will be used for another meal. If you're not prepared to do meal plans, don't shop and cook to excess. Easy.

In other news, a scan of the pantry shelves this morning revealed that in the last four or so months, I have made over 30 jars of jam/marmelade/chutney, many of which cost virtually nothing to make because the fruit (figs, blackberries - yes, they have a use, and since we don't use sprays they were organic) came from the garden. And the fruit that I did buy, at super-cheap South Melbourne market, was invariably less than $2 a kilo.

If you have never eaten blackberry and lime jam, I urge you to try making it. Ditto fig and lime.

Indeed, to ensure that nothing was wasted, I made eight jars of jam yesterday afternoon (fig, blood plum).

Between this and the spoils of Coles getting rid of Bonne Maman for 99¢ a few months ago, we are jammed up for the next year.

I would say that the most useful culinary skill I have acquired in the last year is preserving (or at least equal first with sourdough-making). Given that we would otherwise be looking at paying around $4 for a smallish jar of jam (if not more), knowing how to do it oneself could be very cost effective.

My other super secret tip for jam is to go to places like the A1 bakery and middle eastern grocers, because we have scoffed some unbelievably good Syrian apricot jam, which was very reasonably priced.

On a slightly different note, the Guardian's food blog Word of Mouth continues to be worth a read - this post is no exception. Read the comments. Laugh.

And a mouldy Christmas to you, too

A few weeks ago, we stopped by a new gourmet food shop at Chadstone*, and were taken by the caramelised fig and quince jam that was out for sampling. Thinking it would be sufficiently flavoursome and interesting for Christmas breakfasting, we bought a jar. A rather pricey jar** but we thought "What the hell; it's Christmas".

Come Christmas morn, I open the jar of jam and am greeted by the sight of a healthy flush of mould on the surface and on the inside of the lid.

Yum yum. Needless to say, we returned it.***

Mouldy jam is the sort of thing you could almost forgive an amateur preservist for. Almost. But given that I have made fig jam with seventy-five per cent less sugar than most jams and still not had it go mouldy after a year in the pantry, I'm not very forgiving of a sugary jam supposedly made by professionals, with professional preserving equipment.

---

On a less revolting note, and for the curious, the Christmas Day menu was:

Breakfast: Schwobs dark rye, a sourdough roll, Beurre d'Isigny Sainte-Mère (or in my case, cottage cheese), an excellent Syrian apricot jam procured on a Sydney Rd jaunt, Vallee d'Ourthe wild blueberry jam, Illy espresso (with frothed milk and Lindt chocolate shavings on top; and not, for mine).

Lunch: Cheese platter, with King Island ashed brie, Yarra Valley Dairy gemello, taleggio and a Spanish blue cheese we got from YVD (have forgotten variety - it's enough to say, nom nom nom), Maggie Beet plum paste, a thinly-sliced Sundowner apple, pecans, brazils, freshly cracked walnuts.

Dinner: Organic buckwheat blini, with salmon roe and fresh dill. Huon smoked salmon and freshly-baked organic sourdough rye, accompanied by a beetroot and dill salad, a garden salad, a fruit salad (with organic figs and raspberries from the garden) and sheep's milk yogurt. Prosecco.

Finished off with Dan Lepard's extra-moist stollen**** modified by me to contain dried sour cherries in lieu of raisins, cherry brandy in lieu of rum, and mahlepi in lieu of cardamom etc. Served up with Maggie Beer burnt fig and bitter almond ice-cream.

Nom.

*For the curious, not one with the initials SJ, although I did have a lovely cup of Earl Grey tea there.

**And this is pricey not by our standards, since we don't settle for less than Bonne Maman. The name "Cottee's", for instance, would never darken our shelves.

***To add insult to injury, when we went to the Doncaster branch this morning to return it, the staff said "Oh no, you bought it at the Chadstone store, so it'll have to be returned there". No effing way! Merry Christmas to you, too, tossers!

***See also the most excellent blog by theinversecook.

Your holeyness...

I've tried making sourdough before, and in my anxiety about the starter's activity, semi-sabotaged my efforts by adding some dried yeast; thereby producing an okay loaf of bread, but not a bona fide pain au levain.

In the meantime, my starter languished at the back of the fridge and went a bit furry. I disposed of it, although I later found out that some people have revived furry starters and made bread which didn't actually cause death or disability. Curses!

Having taken a week off to recuperate from getting my wisdom teeth removed (an altogether unpleasant experience, since one side of my face swelled up like a football), I decided that all this free time at home would be an excellent opportunity for me to get a starter going again. Using Dan Lepard's method, Laucke flour, some lovely biodynamic yogurt and organic raisins, I had a pretty active little jar of gloop after a few days.

Despite two minor disasters (the dough stuck to the proving cloth, and mucking the surface up; I burnt my arm on the oven shelf in my dismay), the result was quite successful. I am particularly pleased with the holeyness of the crumb. The loaf was about 80% Laucke wallaby flour and 20% rolled oats for interest.



My second attempt was a sourdough rye.



Because rye flour has less gluten than wheat flour, you don't get that proteinous scaffolding to support big holes in the crumb - hence, a much denser bread is produced. I don't think the bread proved long enough, which is why it's a bit flat, and my shaping abilities are terrible, but it's not a bad loaf at all. And I didn't burn myself this time!

Now if I can just sort out the problem of my oven drying the crust out too much (i.e. work out how to turn the fan off)...

Cake bakery round-up

I'm trying to keep track of what I've made, but I haven't been very assiduous about it. I also need to remember to take more photos.

Apple & Quince Yeast Cake

Made 13 July 2008.

I can’t remotely remember what recipe I used to make this. It may have been a bit of this, with some raisins in the yeast dough. I also will have omitted the cream, because we never have it in the house. I put in around two poached, sliced quinces and one (or two?) sliced Pink Lady apples (which was what was in the house at the time). These were strewn across the brioche dough, and two tablespoons of raw sugar sprinkled on the top before baking.

And then I dusted it with icing sugar, for prettiness...




Pumpkin Cake

From Stephanie Alexander’s Cooking and Travelling in South-West France. It is supposed to have caramelised orange slices to go with it, but I could not be bothered to make them, so I used some homemade Seville orange marmalade.

Made 27 July 2008.

Ingredients:

1.2kg peeled, seeded and thinly sliced pumpkin (SA reckons on needing a 1.5kg pumpkin for this amount of flesh – I had a 2kg Kent pumpkin, the remainder of which I chopped and froze for later uses, e.g. pumpkin scones.)
50g butter
100g raw sugar
1 large whole egg
3 large egg yolks
grated zest of 1 lemon
as much cinnamon as you like
75g plain flour

Method:

Put around ¼ cup raw sugar in a saucepan with about a tablespoon of water, at medium heat, until dissolved. Increase heat and boil until it becomes caramelly in colour. Pour into a 9”/23cm cake tin, tilting to cover the base and sides. Set aside.

Preheat oven to 150˚C.

Steam the pumpkin until tender, drain in a colander for 10 minutes. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE THIS! Else, you will end up with waterlogged pumpkin like I had.

Melt the butter in a large frying pan, put in the pumpkin and cook, stirring, to coat in the butter and evaporate remaining water (see caps lock bit above). Remove from the heat, and allow to cool. Puree it in a food processor (n.b. this mixture will taste absurdly delicious, and could theoretically be used as a soup base).

Using a mixer (i.e., my KitchenAid), beat the sugar, egg, egg yolks together until thick and pale. Add zest, flour, cinnamon and add pumpkin and beat well. There will be a lot! Pour it into the tin and cook until it is done. SA says 45 minutes, but mine needed over an hour, presumably because my pumpkin was too wet.

SA also says you should allow to cool completely before unmoulding. She’s right. I didn’t do this, and it was all a little bit gooey.

I finished off by spooning over my rather loosely-set marmalade of 2007.

Nonetheless, the cake was fearsomely good – very moist, interesting texture, and relatively healthy.

Pear Chocolate Muffins

Adapted from this Cuisine.com.au recipe. I didn’t have any spelt flour, as for some reason it is prohibitively expensive here (I found it easily, and fairly cheaply, in organic form at Tesco in England, under the Doves Farm brand. When will Australian supermarkets move into the 21st century?). So I used plain unbleached flour, which worked fine (albeit not as healthy).

My version is as follows:

2¼ cups flour
1 tbsp baking powder
3 free-range eggs
¼ cup raw sugar
1¼ cup milk
1 tbsp hazelnut oil
As much orange zest as I could get off an orange
A good slosh of vanilla essence

Filling

3 ripe beurre bosc pears, diced
100g chopped chocolate (I used Droste 70% cocoa solid + orange chocolate, as it was ludicrously cheap at the supermarket)

Method:

Whisk together all the dry ingredients. In a separate bowl, whisk together all the wet ingredients. Stir the wet into the dry. Spoon in the pears and the chocolate.

Stir gently and spoon into oiled muffin tin – the mixture went into nine large muffin moulds. Put into a preheated oven set at 170˚C for 30 minutes or until golden brown.

Pear Sultana Loaf

Made 10 August 2008.

This was adapted from a Taste.com.au recipe. My version is as follows:

Ingredients:
80g butter, chopped
1/2 cup raw sugar
2 cups self-raising flour, sifted
2 eggs, beaten
1 lemon, rind finely grated
1 cup sultanas
¼ cup apple juice concentrate, then enough water to make up to 1 cup
1 large, unripe beurre bosc pear, grated

Icing
1/2 cup icing sugar, sifted
½ teaspoon ground cardamom
Enough lemon juice to mix above into a paste

Method

1. Preheat oven to 180°C. Grease a non-stick 900g/2lb loaf tin (n.b. I used spray light olive oil, because I am tremendously lazy).
2. Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Transfer to a mixing bowl. Add sugar, flour, eggs, lemon rind, sultanas, apple concentrate mixture and pear. Mix until well combined, and turn into the tin.
3. Bake until a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean (the recipe says 50-60 minutes, I checked after 50 with my fan-assisted oven, and it was ready). Cool in pan for 10 minutes before turning onto a wire rack to cool completely.
4. Make icing by combining icing sugar and cardamom in a heatproof, microwave-safe bowl. Add lemon juice and stir until a thick paste forms. Heat in the microwave for a bit until runny. The power and length of time obviously depends on your oven.
5. Pour icing over cake and spread to cover. Allow icing to set before serving.

Healthy Apple Donuts

Made 17 August 2008. Adapted from a recipe in the current issue of Australian Gourmet Traveller.

620g plain flour (Around 120 g made up with organic, wholemeal flour. Note that the recipe says “750g/5 cups”, which looks wrong to me!)
100 g raw sugar
2.5 tsp dry yeast
250 mL lukewarm milk, plus extra for brushing
80mL milk curdled with a good squeeze of lemon juice (as a substitute for 80mL buttermilk)
2 eggs, at room temperature
30g melted butter

Apple filling
1.5 massive Granny Smith apples, coarsely chopped
45 mL apple juice concentrate
2 tsp cinnamon
juice of one lemon and one orange


1. Combine flour, sugar and yeast in the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with a dough hook and mix to combine. In another bowl, whisk together milk, ersatz buttermilk, eggs and the melted butter. With motor running, add milk mixture and mix on medium speed until dough is smooth and elastic (4-5 minutes). Form into a ball, place in a lightly oiled bowl (I used walnut, just in case it will add some interesting nuance), cover with plastic wrap and stand in a warm place until double in size. I won’t give any time indication, as in a Melbourne winter it all very much depends on how warm your house is.
2 . For the apple filling, put apples, juices and concentrate in a saucepan, stir over medium heat, bring to the boil and cook until the apple is tender. Cool.
3. Preheat oven to 190˚C. Knock down dough, turn onto a lightly floured work surface and roll to 5mm thick. Using a 7cm-diameter cutter, cut 12 rounds from dough. Using an 8cm-diameter cutter, cut 12 rounds from remaining dough (re-roll scraps if necessary). Place smaller rounds on a baking paper-lined oven tray 5cm apart and place a heaped teaspoon of apple filling in centre of each. Brush edges with milk, cover with larger rounds and press to seal edges well. Trim edges by cutting with a 7cm-diameter cutter. Cover with a tea towel and stand in a warm place until risen (1-1½ hours). Bake until bottoms are just golden (8-10 minutes).

Brush with a little melted butter mixed with a bit of millk, and toss in cinnamon sugar. (I am highly averse to using 120g melted butter, as per the recipe. This looks like overkill!)

Also made at some point in the last few months…

Haalo’s Garibaldi, albeit with ordinary raisins. These were great, and one day I will have to try making them with dried sour cherries.

Twice, I have made Dan Lepard’s cinnamon fruit cake, with some alterations (namely, more cinnamon, and usually some sort of brandy/rum substance instead of the tea). It is very good.

The Lake House

Last year, my mother turned fifty (and now she’s going to turn homicidal that I’ve mentioned this). Because of life stresses and a little dismay at that milestone, she didn’t want much of a celebration. Her birthday was marked at home, with a roast lamb dinner, as that was – I felt – the least I could do.

This year she decided that fifty-one was a much more interesting date to celebrate, and though the life stresses hadn’t abated, she let me take her somewhere nice for lunch.

As soon as I suggested it, she was utterly sold on going to The Lake House. She had wanted to go somewhere out of Melbourne, and wasn’t particularly interested in Yarra Valley-ing, since we traipse around there quite often.

For a long time, she had wanted to go to Daylesford, and the pretty setting seemed to fulfil her need for some aesthetic nourishment.

I prepared by borrowing a copy of Alla Wolf-Tasker’s book, and quietly appreciated her writing and style.

The Sunday after her birthday, we drove to Daylesford. We arrived nice and early, and the picturesque town was a welcome change from the astonishingly depressing drive out of Melbourne.

I was very much taken by the water feature near the restaurant entrance, and the fragrant quinces set to one side.



Alas, out of embarrassment, I could not bring myself to photograph the food. How do fellow food bloggers manage it? We were however, hugely entertained by the antics of the kookaburras, which some of the more soft-hearted staff were feeding bits of – presumably – pancetta.



As we perused the menu, we were brought house-made bread rolls and butter. Though rather salty, the rolls were very good.

Mama went for the lunch special, which is extremely good value. For her starter, she had the Caesar salad, which featured a rather extraordinary panko-crumbed poached egg. A lover of poached eggs anyway, she raved for weeks afterwards that it was the best poached egg she’d ever had.

For her main course, she had (if I remember rightly) game sausages.

I chose Murray Cod from the a la carte menu, and given that this particular fish is quite scarce, I feel privileged that I’ve had the opportunity to try it. That said, I am not a huge fan of white fish, and this – though beautifully cooked – was no exception. It was, however, accompanied by a cauliflower puree that was so delicious that it has overwritten my memories of ghastly cauliflower cheese such that I am now able to enjoy this vegetable once more.

For dessert, she had the option of a chocolate or a flourless quince cake. Though I do not eat cake, I quite like to at least taste a little of what is on offer. I quietly hoped that she would not go for the chocolate, which would bore me – and so I was gratified that she did indeed choose the quince.

As I say, I do not particularly like sweet food, but the quince cake was extraordinary. Very moist, very delicious, and – rarest of all rare things – accompanied by cream so divine that even I could enjoy it. (I generally hate cream and have to scrape it off.)

After cake, and coffees, we took a walk around the lake, which is indeed very pretty.



Whilst I was not personally blown away by the food – as a pescetarian, I am resigned to having limited choices at restaraunts – service, presentation and execution were all excellent. I also appreciate that the food is selected on the basis of seasonality – a factor that we should all consider paramount. I will reiterate that what I enjoyed the most – the cake – was what I least expected to appreciate. And, importantly, Mama thought it was all wonderful.

Giant Steps/Healesville Harvest

Over yonder, Ed asks "What is good service in a restaurant?"

Whatever the answer is, it isn't what I experienced at Giant Steps this afternoon.

I've been to GS twice before, and found the service efficient - if a little impersonal - and the food palatable. Today I found GS populated by "cannot-be-bothered-I-am-wonderful-what-on-earth-are-you-mere-mortals-doing-here?" types.

We waited for ages after being officiously bustled to a terrible table; requests for somewhere better were refused and then we were ignored. Plus the menu didn't excite me at all - so we left.

We ended up going to Healesville Harvest. My mother had their soup - chicken and spinach, with proper rustic toasted bread with what appeared to be parmesan - and I had a toasted eggplant, ricotta and spinach sandwich, which though a bit oily was pretty good. My macchiato was superb, my mother's cappucino looked excellent, and the flourless quince cake was amazing (the real distinction was that the nuts were quite roughly chopped).

So, Giant Steps - 0, Healesville Harvest - maybe one. (It was good, though not fabulous/)